my top 10 albums of 2023!

If you’ve kept up with me online for a while, you might be aware that every December 31, I post a list of my ten favorite albums of the year. I look forward to doing it every year. Since I’ve started writing reviews, I thought I’d also make a blog post about it!

I always see posts online saying, “This year was the year for music”, but I think that statement is a little silly considering how much incredible music comes out every year. I’m very excited to dig in.

However, there are two things I’m going to change about this list compared to past lists: the first is that there is no Taylor Swift despite her having released two albums this year. Sadly, for those of you who were pining away for the new year where I’d hopefully stop being obsessed with her, this is not because they are not great.1989 and Speak Now (the albums that were re-recorded and released this year) are already known to be some of the most valuable albums of her career (although technically, all of them are) so giving them spots among albums that haven’t had years to become valuable devalues them a little. My second change is that this list is all women. This isn't because men didn't release anything good this year - Zach Bryan is just one example of a man with a great 2023 release. This is instead because I've done a lot of research this year on sexism in the industry and I want to use my platform to shed light on some women.

So, without further ado, here are my top 10 albums of the year!

1. The Good Witch by Maisie Peters

If you’ve kept up with my reviews thus far, you may have already known that this album would be number 1 on the list, as I state at the beginning of my full review of this album.

Teased since just two months after the release of her debut album, You Signed Up For This (2021), and Maisie’s stadium tour opening for Ed Sheeran, Maisie set high stakes for herself with The Good Witch. The album did not disappoint and considering that it beat out albums by powerhouses like Lana Del Rey and Olivia Rodrigo for number one on this list, it certainly made an impact on me.

“The Good Witch” is largely a breakup album, but from the perspectives of batsh*t craziness, control, and sadness.

Some of the most powerful points of the album include “Watch”, “Body Better”, “Lost the Breakup”, “BSC” (standing for ‘batsh*t crazy’), and “History of Man”.

In “Watch”, the third track of the record, Maisie discusses an ex-lover who is moving on perfectly fine without her. It’s jam-packed with iconic lines, from the all-too-real, “nobody actually happy and healthy has ever felt so desperate to prove it” to, “I saw you and your girlfriend/sure, I don’t know she’s your girlfriend/well, f*cking sue me/’cause at least then, we could talk”. Not to mention the less concise but very honest, “You look better, what the f*ck”. The song opens with a bass line and has great production elements including vocals edited to sound almost like a chorus of people supporting Maisie’s points.

“Body Better” was the lead single of the record and is a strong point purely for the well-written message. Maisie can’t figure out what she did wrong in a relationship and spends this entire song trying to convince herself that her body was the problem. It’s a great example of a song fitting the memes that say, “sad lyrics, happy sound”, as the song is upbeat with devastating lyrics. Some of these include, “The worst way to love somebody’s to watch them love somebody else and it work out”, “was I just an idea you liked, a convenient use of time with obedient blue eyes?” and “When you touched (my body), were you sorry?” The song builds to her pacing in her thoughts in the bridge and then dragging out the line, “Has she got a body better than mine?” with an amazing transition as she enters the final chorus.

The second single of this album was “Lost the Breakup”, which has as many iconic lines as “Watch” and “Body Better”, but this time they’re iconic because they’re kind of hilarious. It’s a pop banger about looking forward to moving on from someone and therefore talking about them as if you’ve already moved on. A line I love from each part of the song (because there are so many to talk about) include, “got the news just last month that I am exhausting and you’re not in love”, “oh sh*t! you lost the breakup”, “is she just like me? Yeah, I reckon/you got two types: country and western” and “you say ‘wow, hey, it’s been forever/do you wanna get a drink, like, together?’/I say ‘I’m kinda busy but, like, stay in touch!’” She sings the song knowing that she won but that she won’t fully feel it for a moment.

“BSC” is a personal favorite of mine. Saying “BSC” stands for “batsh*t crazy” says all you need to know about this song, as it’s pretty much just her saying crazy stuff. Another way to represent this is a line in the bridge, literally reading, “I am unhinged”. To add onto this, “BSC” is still only a shortened acronym of the hook, as the full thing is, “I’m actually bloody motherf*cking batsh*t crazy”. It’s a wild ride and everyone should listen to it.

Lastly, one of the best parts of the entire album is the closing track, “History of Man”. The song uses religion to explain heartbreak. The purpose of the song closing off the album is a little different than you’d expect for a heartbreak album. For example, Taylor Swift closed her own (as widely regarded) personal heartbreak album, Red, with “Begin Again”, a track about falling into a brand-new love (at least on the standard edition that came out in 2012 – the original deluxe version and the later re-recorded version both end in heartbreak songs). However, instead of being about falling back in love, “History of Man” is a form of sarcastic acceptance of her luck (or lack thereof) with men. One of the most powerful lyrics in the song is, “The men start wars, yet Troy hates Helen”.

To close off the strong points section for this album, I must also give an honorary mention to the final track on the deluxe edition, “The Last One”. This is the only love song on the entire record and is insane.

Now, I’ve tried to find weak points of every album on this list, but “The Good Witch” was especially hard. The only way I was able to find a weak point was by picking apart anything that wasn’t an utterly splendid addition. The only song I found was “Therapy”. As you might’ve seen me explain in my review, I just don’t think it adds the right thing to the record. She’s gone insane moving on from someone, and while I suppose going to therapy is a good way to transition from “BSC” to “There It Goes” (an acceptance song), it doesn’t add much to the story. “You’re Just A Boy (And I’m Kinda The Man)” can serve virtually the same purpose with the same quality but a more interesting sound. The deluxe tracks, “Holy Revival” or “The Song” could’ve served this purpose as well.

2. Rolling Up the Welcome Mat by Kelsea Ballerini

Kelsea Ballerini was going off from August of 2022 through August of 2023. In this period, she released her fourth album, a new EP, and an updated version of the same EP, while touring somewhere in there (which I was lucky enough to see and end up a foot away from her for one song and even meet her opener, who I’m a fan of.)

While the album I mentioned, SUBJECT TO CHANGE, was released in September 2022 and was about going through changes in, well, everything in life, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat was about the divorce that this album appeared to be leading up to. Announced on Valentine’s Day, this EP is about virtually the opposite of the holiday's purposes and comes with videos for every song.

Rolling Up the Welcome Mat opens with the track, “Mountain With A View”. The key line of the song is, “I think that this is when it’s over for me”, a direct response to her ex-husband (the subject of the EP), Morgan Evans’ song, “Over For You”. A few lines in the August 2023 updated EP Rolling Up The Welcome Mat (For Good) also address this song. In “Blindsided (Yeah, Sure, Okay)”, she sings, “Now you’re singing it loud on the radio like you’re the only heart that breaks/you would’ve searched the whole world over?/yeah, sure, okay”. “Mountain With A View” was either written in time with the situation or as if it had been, as she sings, “One day, you’ll ask, ‘when was it over for you’?”. It’s an incredible start to this EP.

The second track on this record is my personal second favorite (the first track is my favorite). “Just Married” has a haunting-sounding guitar playing throughout, although the song itself isn’t super haunting. It’s very desolate in accepting the ending of the marriage, but Kelsea makes it clear that the situation isn't complicated at all. In the first verse, she sings, “I don’t think I lied when I said I wanted that life/I guess I was too young to understand what I wanted to begin with”. She emphasizes a lack of communication, and the song builds miraculously with ethereal background vocals. She plays on the words, “just married”, using the phrase for its usual purpose at first (“rode off in a car that said ‘just married’”) and then putting emphasis on the “just” (“it was love, then it was just… married”). She ends the bridge solemnly, saying, “dammit, I wish I wasn’t this ready to undo ‘I do’”.

“Penthouse” is the hit of Rolling Up The Welcome Mat. It is the ultimate modern sad country song. The song can be explained simply with the line, “I guess wrong can look alright when you’re playing ‘home’ in a penthouse”. She spends the entire song explaining it, and then hits the gut punch on the last line of the bridge, “it stings, rolling up the welcome mat, knowing you got half”.

The next song, “Interlude”, is everything you’d want to hear confirmation of from a woman in the country music industry. It is not unknown to anyone who does research how women have been shunned for decades in the industry, and Kelsea confirms this situationally with the line, “Ain’t it like this town to only criticize a woman?” In the longer version, on the updated EP, she adds the line, “I hope you sleep better at night now that you got an army of people that believe I’m the word that you used to call me”. She also mentions how the internet perceives her as she goes through the divorce, “the internet says I’m losing weight”. Despite being only 45 seconds long, “Interlude” sends some of the most important messages of the entire EP.

“Blindsided” exists to show just how ignored she felt in this relationship. The song seems to be explaining how her ex didn’t understand how the relationship was over just like that, but she doesn’t understand how he didn’t see it coming. The beginning of the chorus says it well enough – “now you’re saying that you’re lost, and that’s lost on me/years of sitting across from me in therapy”. The extended version of this song on Rolling Up the Welcome Mat (For Good) has an extension that I mentioned earlier about her more direct reaction to his song (also the one I mentioned earlier) in which he pretty much says that the divorce blindsided him.

The final track of the EP is fully acoustic, called “Leave Me Again”. Very nice and poetically, this hook isn’t about someone else leaving her. It’s about her leaving herself. She spends the song wishing the best for her ex and then explains in the choruses that she accepts that things changed. She closes it off with, “...And I hope I never leave me again”.

There isn’t much to say about this album overall – in its truest form, it’s a breakup album made so she can move on with her life and not make her heartbreak take up a full studio album. This is further supported by the final change in Rolling Up The Welcome Mat (For Good); “How Do I Do This”, a bonus song, is about preparing for her first date after the divorce – likely a big part of whatever she has next. Paralleling this, the revised EP replaces the studio version of “Penthouse” with a live version in which she changes the lyric, “now I don’t know where you’re sleeping” to “now I don’t care where you’re sleeping”. Fittingly, the live recording is named “Penthouse – Healed Version”, as opposed to “Penthouse – Live Version”.

After this mini-era within the SUBJECT TO CHANGE era, I’m excited to see where Kelsea goes with her fifth album.

3. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd? by Lana Del Rey

I have been a huge fan of Lana Del Rey since the year she released her album Norman F*cking Rockwell (2019). That album remains my favorite of hers, but I’ve kept up since and I’m excited to say that Lana did not disappoint and managed to release another album that I love almost as much as that one.

Topically as an album, Did you know… is very similar to the next album on my list, Gracie Abrams’ debut album. I was faced with a challenge when ranking these. Both albums – while different lengths – have proportionately the same number of songs about heartbreak as about a love that comes a little out of nowhere. Lana is heartbroken until “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing” (yes, that’s a real song title) ends, after which she embarks upon the viral and slightly shocking when listening to this album in order, “Let the Light In”. Gracie Abrams does essentially the same thing in her album, although the love comes “out of the blue” so the song before the love shift is even less predictable. The reason why I put Did you know… over Gracie’s album, Good Riddance, is because Lana’s album is more complex (which is hard to execute at this album's level, but Lana succeeds) and well-produced (although that part is more subjective than I wish it was for this list.)

To talk about the complexity briefly is important for any Lana album. Lana Del Rey has been criticized since pretty much the start of her career for how she covers tough topics in her songs. The album attacks this by talking about trauma in relationships that make her feel overall uneasy both ending old ones and entering new ones.

In one of the best songs on the album, “A&W”, the hook is literally, “This is the experience of being an American wh*re”. She spends the entire song talking about how her life didn’t play out the way she feels it was supposed to (“Look at me, look at the length of my hair, my face, the shape of my body/do you really think I give a damn what I do after years of just hearing them talking?” and “watching Teenage Diary of A Girl, wondering what went wrong”), which is also discussed in the track, “Fingertips”. “A&W” starts as a sweet piano song where she’s cathartically explaining what her life is like and how it’s deteriorated. Then it turns into an interlude that seems to resemble meeting up with one of the people she’s been getting this name as a result of her time with, and it finishes off with a rap section where she explains that she’s being used (“Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high”) and is talking down to this person, while also kind of warning them (“your mom called, I told her you’re f*cking up big time”).

The title track - the lead single - also discusses this, but in a sadder way. She thinks sex is the only way to self-love, as explained in the choruses. The song itself is almost less desperate than others like "A&W" (although that’s somewhat subjective). She sings more calmly and as if she’s less confused. The song's core erupts in the second half, which is repetitive with the hook “Don’t forget me, like the tunnel under Ocean Blvd”. The album title makes a lot of sense for what the album is about – she doesn’t want to be forgotten, so she titles it something forgotten that she therefore thinks people might cling to.

By the time the next strong point, “Let the Light In” rolls in, Lana has settled that sometimes you must sacrifice pain for love, and vice versa. She gets through this by realizing that pain lets the light in, providing a perfect transition into this track featuring Father John Misty. “Let the Light In” is a lighthearted song with no sad undertones for the first time on the album. It’s alive and is the first track on the album that feels truly freeing and not as if the livingness of it is weighing down on the listener. It’s my personal favorite to go on a Sunday afternoon golden hour drive listening to.

“Margaret” featuring Bleachers is another viral song, although not in the same way as “Let the Light In”. In both the happy and sad sections of the album, “When you know you know” is the main lyric of the chorus of a song. The first time is in “Paris, Texas”, where she uses it to explain why she left for said location. She knew it was time to go. In “Margaret”, however, she uses it to explain how her friend (literally Jack Antonoff, the lead singer of Bleachers) saved his relationship with his real-life wife, Margaret. This can be explained by when she says, “When you know you know/baby, if your love is in trouble”. While the message is sad, Lana uses it to portray the feeling of wanting to preserve love and how valuable it is when done right.

Overall, the album's only weak points are “Judah Smith Interlude” and “Jon Batiste Interlude”. Both interludes convey important messages, but they’re not really something anyone will listen to using their own free will the same way they might listen to other songs on the record. The first of the interludes is a speech, and the second is a recording of joy and musical improvisation where Jon Batiste is happy and Lana is improvising music.

The only thing I have left to say about this album is that I’m interested to see the reaction on the Grammys stage this February (on my birthday, in fact!) as this album is nominated for quite a few awards, including the highly coveted Album of the Year award.

4. Good Riddance by Gracie Abrams

Gracie Abrams has been relatively active in the music industry for years – she released her debut EP, Minor, in 2020, and her sophomore EP This Is What It Feels Like in 2021. She’d been recognized as a “daughter of Taylor Swift” for a while before 2023, but it was this year that she truly grounded herself in that position.

A sad-girl pop artist, Gracie Abrams’ debut album is a breakup album. Well, up until “The blue” hits, and then it’s encapsulated by pure love. Additionally, anxiety is an overarching theme with pretty much everything she releases (including this album), so while it feels unimportant to mention as a huge fan, it’s a large part of the context. Produced by Aaron Dessner, it’s a step away from her earlier pop work. It features more natural sounding instruments, and has many more folk, alternative, and sometimes slightly country sounds. You can read my review of Good Riddance for a more in-depth explanation of the album overall.

The only thing that makes it weaker than previous albums listed is that you can pretty much only get through it completely if you love sad music. Every song on the album could be incredible for anyone if played individually, but even as a sad song lover myself, the repetition of sadness gets a little bland after a moment. Also, even when songs aren’t sad in topic, they still sound sad instrumentally.

That being said, almost every song on the album is very strong. Some don’t have a profound peak but have unique sounds compared to other songs – like “Amelie”, a fully acoustic and heavily folk-inspired song. There isn't anything particularly special about it except for its production, which stands out from other songs. “This is what the drugs are for” is similar – its lyrics are powerful even though they don’t stick out much compared to other songs. But on its strong side, its instrumentation is driven and feels exactly how I feel when I try to watch Les Mis.

In terms of songs that are perhaps the strongest of the album, “I know it won’t work”, “Where do we go now?”, “Difficult” and “Right now” take the cake (with an honorary mention to “I should hate you”, which has an incredible bridge but otherwise has components that appear in lots of other songs on the record).

“I know it won’t work” became the hit of the album after Gracie performed it on Jimmy Kimmel live and included a beat drop that inspired multiple TikTok trends. It has pop references that tie back to her previous work while maintaining the nature of her new style and is full of non-complicated but exceptionally clever lyrics. Some of these include, “part of me wants to walk away till you really listen/I hate to look at your face and know that we’re feeling different/’cause part of me wants you back but/I know it won’t work like that, huh?” and “I’m thinking everything you wish I wasn’t/the call was tough, but you’re better off/I’m being honest”.

The first single released that was officially for the album was “Where do we go now?”, (my personal favorite) which also has similar sounds to her previous work. It has more of a piano feeling than many other songs on the record and feels like a hug with some infiltrated sadness while other songs feel like sadness and nothing else. The bridge is amazing despite not having some qualities other impeccable bridges on this album have – it follows her infamous whisper-singing theme and runs on a little bit but with control. This causes it to stand out. This song, like “I know it won’t work” is full of undeniably real but not complicated lyrics, like “guess the space was the thing that I needed, but I miss you”.

“Difficult”, like I say in my review of this album, moves the way a good heavy cry does. Every breath between lyrics is heavy and very much needed for the pace of the song. It spirals and pauses for air the same way you might when you pause while crying. Meanwhile, none of it feels tacky, and it too uses Gracie’s favorite vocal technique of whisper-singing.

Lastly, “Right now”, the closing track, is when Gracie falls in love with life. It feels like the end of winter, when you feel spring coming even though it still hasn’t come by the time the song has ended. The hook is beautiful while, again, being simple, “I feel like myself right now”.

In my opinion, the only weak point of the entire record is “Will you cry?” The song feels shallower and like a filler. It drags the album out longer than it needs to and doesn’t hold much power besides the verse that can be summarized by the final lyric, “Now I stop myself from holding onto something that makes me feel a little less alive”. Here is also where I’ll say that I’ve changed my mind a little since I reviewed this album – I like “Fault line” a lot more than I previously did, and I’m excluding it from being a weak point in this album because I deem its ambient sound unique enough that it doesn’t bring down anything in the album. In fact, “Fault line” is part of the reason why I won’t even try to explain a replacement for “Will you cry?”, as all the deluxe tracks say things that other songs like “Fault line” explain well enough that there’s no reason to include another song there. Unless, of course, Gracie wanted to include another love song, which I would be all ears for.

Gracie said recently that she is working on her second album, which I am excited to hear in hopefully the next year.

5. GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo

Olivia Rodrigo had high standards to live up to going into this album release following the success of SOUR (2021), and her sophomore album, GUTS, lived up to them.

GUTS is a heartbreak album like its predecessor, although it has much more of a theme of girlhood than SOUR did. This theme went viral the summer before this album’s release, thanks to the Barbie movie, so the timing is kind of perfect. However, I marked this album a little bit down on this list because Olivia Rodrigo’s music is a little too timeless. Known for her throwbacks into past decades on her debut album, throwback sounds are a theme with Olivia. She manages to combine these themes very well with modern musical trends, but she still isn’t as good at it as other stars who pull it off. The album also almost tells a story at some points, only for the focus to shift to a new thing before it feels complete. For example, “vampire” (the lead single) feels like a part 2 to “bad idea, right?” (the second single), but that’s about where the story ends despite feeling framed to add more. The album simply doesn’t flow as well and isn’t as moving as other albums on this list.

The opening track, “all-american bitch”, is one of the best songs on the record. It opens with a catchy guitar hook that takes me right back to 2000s music, and the chorus is an amazing explosion. After the bridge, she has a screaming fit, only for it to completely end in her singing a lullaby of affirmations to herself. The song is essentially just affirmations sung in different moods. It’s a banger and I would love to hear it live.

“Lacy” is the next strong point. Firstly, the writing of the song is some of the best on the album. She encapsulates jealousy as a teenager perfectly. My favorite part, which makes it my favorite song she’s ever released, is when the vocals change at the end of the line, “It’s like you’re made of angel dust”. The word “dust” explodes into harmonies and new instruments, and it feels like floating. When this part ends, she expresses her remorse at letting herself feel this way, “It’s like you’re out to get me, you poison every little thing that I do”.

For SOUR, the rock songs were “brutal” and “good 4 u”, and for GUTS, it’s “ballad of a homeschooled girl”. The song is about social anxiety and sums up being a teenager with the same quality as both prior songs I’ve listed as strong points for this album. A large part of the song is her wailing, “It’s social suicide”, which sums up the entire song fairly well.

“get him back!” is the next strong point. It’s extremely catchy and features a play on the phrase it’s named after. She both wants this boy back and wants to hurt him back. It opens with a super catchy verse featuring the irrelevant-to-explaining-the-song-but-iconic-so-I-must-include-it line, “he said he’s 6 foot 2 and I’m like dude, nice try!” and ends with her saying, “I’m gonna get him so good he’s not even gonna know what hit him, he’s gonna love me and hate me at the same time” and after some mumbling, “I don’t know, I got him good, I got him really good”.

Finally, “teenage dream” ends the album on a high note. Unlike the song by Katy Perry most people associate this song title with, “teenage dream” is a sad piano song about literally not being a teenage dream. It’s full of contemplative lyrics, like, “When am I gonna stop being great for my age, and just start being good?/when will it stop being cool to be quietly misunderstood?” The bridge starts calm but then explodes with belting high notes. She spends the entire bridge singing, “They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow/yeah, they all say that it gets better, it gets better, but what if I don’t?” The album ends with a recording of a baby talking.

While no song on this entire album is fully weak, “logical”, “making the bed” and “pretty isn’t pretty” all fall a little short. For both “logical” and “making the bed”, my only problem is with the melodies. They just feel a bit repetitive, and for “Logical” especially, it’s just not very fun to sing along to. “logical” is very high during the choruses, and the melody isn’t exciting enough to sing for that to be made up for, like with “vampire”. Additionally, the outro of the song feels unnecessary. “making the bed” is full of great lyrics but is even more boring to sing along to. I’m aware songs have value aside from being fun to sing along to, these just aren’t even very fun for me to listen to. Lastly, “pretty isn’t pretty” feels like what's missing of “all-american bitch”, and yet it still doesn’t complete the job. “teenage dream” finishes what “pretty isn’t pretty” can only attempt to do. However, I think “pretty isn’t pretty” has an important enough topic that it would’ve made a good addition to the deluxe version of the album (which I have yet to hear).

I love GUTS and hope I get the privilege of seeing it in concert this summer, although I think that’s unlikely. Nonetheless, I look forward to seeing how the tour goes and learning more about the writing process of this album.

To see the final 5 albums on my ranking, check my Instagram (@itslouiseella)! Thank you so much for reading and I wish everyone all the best in the new year.